Christmas memories

My all time favorite Christmas cartoon is the The Year Without A Santa Claus. My brother Jimmy and I both loved it. Our favorite part was when Heat Miser did his song and dance.



We always joked with our mom that she looked exactly like Heat Miser, right down to the hair, and her dancing abilities. Only, he could sing better. We didn't like their version of Blue Christmas, though. We liked Elvis's version much better.



Jimmy could be counted on to unbutton his shirt and flip up his collar to give us his rendition on demand, as long as Elvis was already playing, you know - backing him up.



I'm not really going anywhere with this, just reliving some good holiday memories and traditions.

Every year it's little bit of a tradition that we have a big sandwich lunch on Christmas day. When we were younger it was a treat for us to have a sandwich that had more than one piece of meat and cheese. We would make Dagwood sandwiches with a variety of meats, cheeses, breads, condiments, maybe pickles and roasted red peppers, the more the better. We always finished it up with a plate of Mom's homemade cookies.

One year, while my sister Bouf was making Christmas cookies, she and Jimmy decided to make something a little naughty. And they put it on Mom's dessert plate of Christmas cookies. Thank god she had a sense of humor!

The importance of wearing a seat belt and locking your car door

One of the many places we lived when I was growing was on a very busy street. I loved this house, I still do. It was on the market recently, and I would have bought it in a heartbeat if I could have afforded it. It was set way back off a dirt driveway, surrounded by overgrowth and trees. It was a raised ranch with 4 bedrooms, 1-1/2 baths and a fireplace in the living room. At the time it was a dump that really needed a lot of work, but I remember it with fondness.

This was where I got my purple Schwinn bicycle with a push button horn that my brother taught me how to ride down the big hill in the front yard. This was where my brother taught me how to play baseball in the back yard. As there were only two of us, we had to say, "ghost on first", "ghost on second". This was also where the little creep shot me in the leg "by accident" with his BB gun. I have a lot of great memories, there. I spent much of my time outdoors, exploring in the woods, often with our German Shepherd, Schnitzel, who was probably my best friend at the time.

My mother had a big blue Rambler. The back seat was a bench seat, and seat belts were unheard of at the time. It was kind of fun because if my mother took a really hard turn, we'd all go sliding across the back seat and crush each other on the door. It was like the amusement park ride that goes really fast in a circle and you can't keep yourself from crushing the person sitting next to you, depending on which way the ride is going.

One day when I was probably 7, my mother piled four of us into the car to go to the grocery store. I don't remember who was sitting next to whom, but I was on one side of the back seat and Bouf was in the middle. Mom was taking a left onto the very busy street and she gunned it because there were cars coming. We all went sliding across the backseat toward me, which should have been fun - until the door popped open. I fell out of the car onto my knees with a line of traffic coming at me at anywhere from 40-60 miles per hour.

My adrenaline must have kicked in, because I remember getting myself up and over to the side of the road, and then when the traffic eased, getting back over to the side of the road that our house was on, while my knees were bleeding down my legs. And waiting and waiting for my mother's car to come back. She didn't realize at first what had happened but finally registered Bouf's hysterical screaming that I had fallen out of the car and turned around to come back for me. I think to this day that Bouf may have been more traumatized by this incident than I was. She saw me falling out of the car and couldn't catch me!

I got an honor position on the couch for the rest of the day with a blankie and everyone treating me like a princess. Bouf even walked up the store and bought me a stuffed animal, Bimini, that I treasured and slept with for at least a year before he was stolen from me on a cross-country bus trip to Las Vegas.

I always locked my car door for at least 10 years after that.

For a long time I couldn't understand how my mother didn't know I had fallen out of the car until I was writing this and started to think about it. A couple of years ago, I was driving my son and two great-nieces to the mall. I often tuned out the younger niece's screaming, because it was almost constant, and I'm the kind of person that really needs to concentrate on my driving. It had started raining, and I closed the rear windows. My younger niece started screaming, but I ignored her because I assumed she was just upset that I had rolled up her window. My son starting yelling, "Mom, Mom!" but he was in such a panic that he couldn't get the words out. "MOM - HER FINGERS ARE STUCK IN THE WINDOW!". Wow, did I feel like a loser! Thankfully, no harm was done to the poor baby, or her fingers.

When is this "you're turning into your mother" shit going to stop?

Dolphin Lab

When I was in my early 20's, I decided to go back to community college part time. I had been working for the same insurance company for a few years, and they agreed to let me go part time at work. I moved back in with my mother to save money, and get some education. In the second semester I threw in one class that had no reason for being on my agenda - Ocean Sciences. I've always been drawn by the ocean, but it also terrifies me.

I have to say I was enamored with this semester. I was getting tutored by a friend who was in the same algebra class I was in - and it finally started making sense to me in a way that it did not when I was in high school. My brain has never been able to comprehend math, and I was doing it, and passing. Also, I was doing exceptionally well in my honors level creative writing class, and also in Ocean Sciences - much to my surprise!

And then my world came crashing down around me when my brother died on March 28, 1993. The only class I went back to was Ocean Sciences, because another teacher in the same department had started a little program called Dolphin Lab. If you signed up for Dolphin Lab, you had to pay a large fee, but they took care of all the details for a week long working vacation in Florida - for which you got 2 credits. I had originally hoped my brother would have been able to go on this trip with me, he would have really loved it. I decided to do it anyway, alone.

The fee included air fare both ways, a dormitory style sleeping arrangement, and meals. Best of all, we interacted for 5 of the 7 days with dolphins at the Dolphin Research Center, DRC, on Grassy Key, Florida.




DRC, was home to the 6 dolphins that played Flipper on the television show. This is one of the most humane places that a dolphin can live. While many of the dolphins are born there, many came from places where they had been neglected or abused, or they needed medical treatment that only DRC could provide. One old girl had been a Navy experiment, quite a few had survived shark attacks in the wild.




This facility does not keep their dolphins in captivity, in the traditional sense of the word. Each enclosure has a low fence that allows the seawater, and fish, to come and go freely. Those low fences could not possibly keep in a high diving dolphin, should they choose to leave. The fences are there mainly to keep out sharks.

If a hurricane is coming in, the staff opens the fences and encourages their dolphins to swim out to sea where they have a better chance of surviving. Most of them return, although when I went in 1993, one had not returned from the last hurricane. There were reports of an incredibly friendly dolphin in the area for months after, but she eventually joined a wild pod and moved on.

They try to keep their enclosures as close to what they would have out in the wild. The biggest enclosure is for mothers, teenage females, and the very young. Other enclosures have a couple of adolescent males, as they would do in the wild by going off on their own in twos or threes; or a matriarch on her own not wanting to be bothered by the youngsters.





There are so many amazing things about dolphins that I learned on this trip. One is that they name themselves. They have what is called a "signature whistle". A female is able to give herself whatever whistle name she wants for herself, although it is very often similar to her mother's signature whistle. A male, on the other hand, adopts his mother's signature whistle for his own. That way, in the wild if a couple of boy dolphins come across a pod of females, and they're all like, "how YOU doin'?", once they find out each other's names, they're all like, "ew, you're my brother", or "ew, you're my mother".





Dolphins don't do incest. The really interesting part is that they are the only mammal other than humans to have consensual homosexual relations. The adolescent boys break off into those pods of two or three, and if they don't meet up with any hot dolphin girls, they use each other for target practice. In the words of one of my teachers, "it's really long". In the words of one of the trainers at DRC, "do NOT touch them DOWN THERE!". They are highly sexual creatures.

I really wanted to know what would happen if I Touched Them Down There, but I didn't. I was afraid I would get kicked out and be stuck in Grassy Key, Florida. Which is 90 miles south of Miami, and 54 miles north of Key West.

I learned so much while I was down there. They taught us how to treat the dolphins with such respect - not that it was hard to do. Each one has their own personality, shy, playful, mischievous, funny. And they are attention hogs! They love to be talked to, or sung to. They chatter at you, and show off. They are amazing, intelligent creatures. If you ever want proof, see the video at the bottom from the beginning of the movie, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

We learned how to approach them, how to hide vitamins and pills in their food, how to feed them, how to give them hand signals and commands. Best of all, we got to touch them and be affectionate with them and love them - and get in the water with them. I fell utterly and completely in love! There is so very much more to say about that trip, and DRC in general. I could just go on and on, but I won't.









The second I got home, I started planning my move down there. I quit my job, pulled all my money out of my 401k and started packing. I kinda lost my mind after my brother died, and for some reason I really felt at peace when I was down there. I decided I was going to become a marine mammologist and work at DRC and live happily ever after. More on that another time.

My mother almost got us kicked out of Monkey Jungle

When I was about 8 years old, my parents took us on a trip to Florida. My father had an old Citroen station wagon that I thought was the coolest car. It had a hydraulic lift system, and jump seats in the back. I really loved that car. It never looked as good as the following picture, it was a dull white (probably spray painted!) with a green hood.



In the end, it looked a little more like the following picture. My father never could get rid of a car until one ex-wife or another sent it to the junkyard. He's a bit of a pack rat.



Anyway, Kouf got to stay home because she was old enough, so my parents loaded the four younger kids and all of their wordly possessions into the Citroen. As my mother couldn't really read maps, Horhay made poor Bouf sit up front and be the map reader. I've done the trip to Florida with my father as his map reader as an adult, and it was brutal. As awful as that job was, however, there was another one that was worse. Because the trunk was piled so high that my father couldn't see out the back window, they smushed Jimmy in between the luggage and the hatchback door so he could see if it was okay to change lanes. For 3 days down and 3 days back, in the middle of winter, where no heat could reach him.

And what a trip it was! On the way down, Virginia and the Carolina's got hit with an ice and snow storm. Apparently in 1979 they shared one plow and one sand truck between all three states. And no one had ever taught anyone in any of those states how to drive in precipitation other than rain. Oh my god, do you mean to tell me that it can freeze? I remember hanging on to my mother for dear life in the back seat while my father stubbornly forged on in his trusty and reliable Citroen, dodging cars that were at a complete stop in the middle of a lane on an interstate highway!

I truly do understand that they were woefully unprepared for what turned out to be a devastating storm for them. Why would they be prepared for something they never expected to have happen? And really, why would they be prepared for Horhay to be driving through it like a mad-man, not willing to stop until "the next planned stop" on our itinerary, dammit?

He carried around a little notebook, and marked down gas prices and mileage, and how long before we were allowed to go to the bathroom, again. I'm sorry, but a little act of God like a major ice storm just didn't fit in with how many miles we HAD to travel that day.

So we got there, all in one piece, and I think we all actually enjoyed ourselves. My father's parents had a trailer in Jensen Beach at the time, and we visited with them, and did a day at the beach. Then we went on and did Disney, and Parrot Jungle and Monkey Jungle.

I remember Parrot Jungle being fun, I have pictures of myself and my siblings posing for pictures where they line the parrots up and down your arms. I was actually a little terrified, I had no previous experience with birds, and quite frankly - they have sharp little beaks and are not against taking a nip out of you. Birds have too much free intellect, and are just a different species altogether. Give me a simian over an avian, any day.

Monkey Jungle was right up my alley. They had many habitats that were wide open, except for nets overhead . The whole thing was amazing to my 8 year old eyes. The best part, however, was that they had people walking around with monkeys. Nowadays, they try very much to show you how cute and cuddly the animals are, but don't let you touch them. Mostly for the animal's sake, but also because of liability issues. Back then, however, they were much more interactive.

We came across a man with a baby spider monkey - In A Diaper! I thought I had died and gone to HEAVEN. This was better than any Betsy Wetsy doll Santa had ever brought me. This was a real live baby monkey, and I wanted to love it, and hug it, and stroke his hair backward and name him George. This was my first real estrogen rush, and I could have easily sacrificed every estrogen rush in my future if I could just bring this baby home with me. Apparently, I was not the only one. Look how happy my brother, Jimmy, looks in this picture.




(And really, good lord, get a hair cut, Mr. 1979 monkey keeper! Barry Gibbs you are not!)

After this picture was taken, the baby monkey kind of crawled up my arm. I don't know whether he was tired, or hungry, or what, but he started sort of suckling my arm. I didn't know what was going on, I was 8. It didn't hurt or anything, it sort of felt like what I later realized a hickey would feel like. Not a big deal, to me. But to my mother, holy crap!

Apparently she thought the wild crazy monkey was trying to eat her youngest daughter. And She Started Hitting It! Hitting and slapping a baby monkey in a diaper, yelling, "get off, get off". Which is why they probably don't let their patrons touch their animals, any longer.

My mother is probably the only person in the history of Monkey Jungle not to get kicked out for slapping their baby monkey while yelling, "get off, get off". And if any one is here because of a really dirty search - HA-HA on you, you pervert.

My bother, Jimmy

My brother, Jimmy, was a lot of things to a lot of people. He was a natural born comedian who hid an abusive past behind a wall of comedy. He almost never let his tragedy side show.

He was the kid who gave my uptight mother wet-willies, and she would laugh. He was the kid who told our mother that he was growing tomato plants in his bedroom in the middle of winter, and she believed him right up until those plants started growing stuff that didn't look at all like tomatoes. He was the kid that took care of both his older and younger sisters, because he felt he had to be the man in the family after my father moved out. He was the kid who took the brunt of my father's brutality before the bastard moved out.

I remember an exceedingly cold night in which my father had told my brother not to let the fire go out in the living room fire place. Jimmy could not have been any older than 11 or 12 at the time. When my father got home from the bar in the middle of the night, Jimmy had fallen asleep on the couch in the living room, and the fire had gone out. He made Jimmy go out in the snow in his pajamas, bare foot , down a set of stairs, over the driveway and up a hill to get more wood for the fire. I can't put a number on how many other similar situations the kid had to endure.

Jimmy started getting into trouble when he was 12. He started using drugs and alcohol around the same time. They sent him to the military academy for ninth grade where my father had gone to high school. Jimmy hated it and made sure he got kicked out. That was pretty much the end of school for him. It turns out that not only do mental health issues run in my family, but also dyslexia. Back then, they just thought he was stupid. He used to ask me to fill out his job applications for him because his "hand writing was so bad." He was pretty much illiterate.



He was the nicest guy you would ever want to meet. He was funny, he was kind, he was generous. He loved kids, he loved wildlife, he loved to go fishing more than anything else in the whole world. He may have eventually looked the part of a dirty, greasy alcoholic who got into bar fights and did some time in jail, but he was never any of those things to us. To us, he was always the only sweet little boy in a house full of girls. "Excuse me, ladies, but I believe someone left their soiled panties to soak in the sink, and I would like to brush my teeth."





I pretty much adored him. Even when he threatened to break the thumbs of a much older guy who I thought would be dreamy to have for my boyfriend, when I was 13. He taught me how to play baseball and how to throw a football. He taught me basic self-defense, and gave me a knife to carry when he found out I was hitch-hiking.

When I was 16 and finally had a much older boyfriend, he offered to give the guy a ride home. I found out much later that Jimmy had waited until they got to my boyfriends house, pulled out an unloaded gun and put it to the boyfriend's head and asked, "are you sleeping with my little sister?". Apparently, the guy nearly shit his pants, making my brother a much better judge of character than I was, in retrospect.

I'm not condoning any of the following behavior. It is the truth, and part of the story.

He had already had a couple of DWI's, as they were called then, when he got pulled over driving an unregistered, uninsured car, containing an unregistered, unloaded fire arm. Possibly the same unregistered, unloaded gun as above. He had picked up a hitch-hiker whom he claimed he didn't know was carrying a large amount of marijuana, which the hitch-hiker stashed under the seat. Possession is 9/10ths of the law and Jimmy got busted for it. He finally lost his license and was lucky enough to be put on probation. He then got caught driving without a license, this time with possession of cocaine. He got sentenced to two one-year jail terms, back to back. In our area there are very different terms you could sit out. Jimmy got sent to what we affectionately called the Brooklyn Country Club. It's like summer camp with dorms, but more barbed wire, and less swimming.

When Jimmy got out of jail, serving less than six months of a two year sentence, he really seemed to have changed his law-breaking ways. He never again got behind the wheel of a car until he had his license back. However, he and alcohol were never very far apart. We thought that he had kicked his love affair with drugs, but we were wrong.

He got steady work at a lumber yard. He and my father moved together into in an apartment. Jimmy sometimes spent weekends at my mother's house, and sometimes spent them at my oldest sister, Kouf's house. He was helping Kouf's husband turn the attic into rooms that they could rent out. He seemed to be a nomad, who was welcome anywhere he went. He was always the life of any party he found himself at.

After five years, the State of Connecticut agreed to give Jimmy his license back. I took the day off of work and brought him for his driver's test. He passed with no problems. From that point on, all we talked about was getting our motorcycle licenses together. I don't know why it seemed so important to us, but it did.

Maybe it meant to me that I had finally proven myself to him that I was an equal, that I could stand up to him, and his friends that he wouldn't let me date. I so wanted to be a bad-ass bitch in his eyes, I guess. Maybe for him, it was the same in reverse. He had taught his little sister to be a bad-ass who could stand up for herself in a world that he tried to, but could not always, protect her from.

Three weeks after getting his license back, we spent a Saturday afternoon together looking at bikes. Neither of us was ready to make any decisions, but we had fun with it. I dropped him off at Kouf's house. I had plans, and Jimmy was staying with her for the weekend. He hadn't yet gotten himself a car.

Kouf and her husband also had plans that evening. Jimmy apparently walked to a nearby bar looking for cocaine. We did not know until later that he had been shooting cocaine intravenously. From what we pieced together, he couldn't find any cocaine, so he decided to try heroin for the first time as it was all that was available. He bought a bad batch that killed 17 people in the Connecticut and New York area.

The next day, I was rather a bit annoyed with my sister, Bouf, for waking me up on a Sunday morning by banging incessantly on the front door at my mother's house. I was hung over and assumed she just needed to do her laundry and had lost her key or something. I opened the door, and was already half-way back up the stairs when she said, "Wait, Fancy, I'm here for a reason - Jimmy's dead". I literally cried like a fucking baby, sitting on the stairs, telling my poor sister that she was a liar. It could not be true, we had just spent the day together. We had plans, goddammit! Why was she being so mean?

My mother had worked a 12-hour shift the night before, 7pm to 7am. Bouf and I had to wake her up and tell her that her only son was dead at the age of 26 of a heroin overdose. That was definitely one of the worst days of my life.

Horhay

My father moved out when I was about 9. I remember my mother telling a social worker at my school about the impending divorce. The social worker was trying to be sympathetic and gave me a book about how I should be okay with feeling sad. SAD? Are you fucking kidding me? We were joyous! Why did it take my mother 23 years of alcoholic rage and abuse to get rid of him?

I don't remember a lot of things about my early childhood, I've been told I am "blocking" memories. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, as I was the youngest. I suffered the least of the abuse, next to Shouf, who was born special. My father, bastard that he was, tended to steer clear of Shouf individually, unless she was being included in the group. Of course, that doesn't mean that either of us didn't see a lot of scary shit!

One of my earliest memories is my father playing hide-and-go seek with us. You would think that would be a happy memory, right? But my father played a "Here's Johnny" version in the middle of the night while my mother was at work. He had woken us all up when he got home from whatever bar he was frequenting after his 2nd shift job. How it worked was we all got the chance to hide, and whomever he found first got beaten with a stick he found in the yard. Who the fuck knows what triggered his anger that night, it could have been anything. I don't remember the outcome, I was probably 6 at the time. All I remember is hiding under a bed with Shouf on one side of me and Bouf on the other. Bouf had one hand over my mouth, and the other hand over Shouf's mouth because we were both hysterical. Kouf, as the oldest, was probably hiding Jimmy. The only boy in the house always deserved to be treated as an extra special punching bag, it didn't matter if he was ten years old. I'm assuming Horhay* must have passed out that night before he found anyone, because I don't remember the outcome. Who knows, maybe I blocked it.

*Horhay is what we now call him. I do realize I'm not spelling it correctly, but Jorge just doesn't have the same look. He is now a sad depressed old man living in Florida all by himself. He is no longer scary, but I still don't want pretty much anything to do with him.

Early family history

I have three older sisters. I have to explain their nicknames, because I don't want to use their real names. When they were growing up, they had an imaginary club called the Kit-Kat club. I'm sure my oldest sister was in charge, but cannot say for sure as I was probably not even alive at the time. What I do know for a fact is they gave each other these nicknames, as I will give you in birth order: Kouf, 10/60; Shouf, 1/62, Bouf 12/62. My mother, god love her, had 3 babies in diapers at the same freakin' time.

It was four years after Bouf before another child was born.

According to the story, when my mother was pregnant with the first child, she swore if it was a boy she would call him David. Instead, Kouf was born.

When my mother was pregnant with her second child, she swore if it was a boy she would call him David. Instead, Shouf was born.

When my mother was pregnant with her third child, she swore if it was a boy she would call him David. Instead, Bouf was born.

When my mother was pregnant with her fourth child, she said (in a yiddish accent), "God, I promise if you give me a son, I will not call him David". And so Jimmy was born.

Her fifth child was me, four years after Jimmy. My mother was just lucky as hell that I was even born. She developed prenatal diabetes while carrying me, and she also slipped in dog poop and went down a flight of stairs and almost miscarried me.

Apparently, she had wanted six kids. Unfortunately for her, she had to have an emergency hysterectomy within a year or two after I was born.

Even God has his/her limits on the number of kids you are allowed to fuck up. Or at least a limit for my mother. My father eventually had another child, and fucked him up, as well.

The clock

I used to live with this woman. Y. We lived in one half of a duplex of an older house. On one of the walls, Y had hung a brass clock with a pendulum. I do not think this clock was old at all, it was probably a newer clock meant to look like an older one. We came to believe that this clock was haunted. Not creepily haunted, but haunted nevertheless by a spirit living in the house that we were inhabiting. We were young.

When we were planning to have a big party, the clock’s pendulum would stop swinging hours in advance. It kept it’s time just fine, and the pendulum would start swinging, again, around noon the next day. We took it as a given, after a while that this is what would happen. There were times, also, that we heard noises in the kitchen that had nothing to do with the clock. Noises that had nothing to do with anything that we could explain. It was a little bit weird, but we didn’t think anything of it. I was a firm believer in the occult, at the time. Once, when I was sick on the couch and Y had gone out for the evening, it sounded to me like a little old lady was making some tea in her kitchen. I assumed that there were things outside of my understanding. I assumed that I was not smart enough, or sensitive enough to understand all the workings of the universe. This was before “the sixth sense” – I did not believe there were dead people everywhere. I’m sure I would have changed my opinion, had I thought that!

Anyway, I moved out of Y’s house, eventually, but was still close with her. We had just taken a trip to NYC, and met a couple of guys in a dance club. They were nice enough that we invited them a couple of weeks later for dinner at Y’s house, then a night of dancing in Hartford’s hot spots (ha-ha). It obviously was not better than the night in Manhatten when we first met, but maybe the boys from Brooklyn thought differently. While we were eating, Y made a point of catching my eye – and pointing it toward the pendulum clock. I looked at it, but had no comprehension of why it would not only have stopped, but it looked like it was vibrating off the wall. The clock had never stopped before. It was definitely shaking, vibrating, trying to jump off the wall.

We gave it no further thought. We finished dinner, had a great night of dancing, and never saw the guys, again. Again, we were young. We assumed that our ghost had grown used to not having a bunch of people around, and was kind of being a bitch about having a couple of guys that we didn't really know over for dinner. Had I thought about it with my knowledge now as a cynical late 30's woman, I never would have gone out with those men that night. However, I was in my early 20's, and didn't really give a hoot.

I found out the next morning that my brother had died the night before. Not at all at the same time the clock was vibrating, but was it trying to tell me something? My brother and I had spent that day together, looking at motorcycles. We had talked stupid talk about getting our motorcycle licenses together. Cause you know I was a bad-ass when it came to impressing my big brother. I wasn't going to be the bitch on the back of a bike! He had just gotten his driver's license back 3 weeks earlier- I was the one who took him. How was I supposed to know that before the next day, he would be dead?